that I have translated into the
Latin tongue the books of Origen Περὶ
᾽Αρχῶν, which
are pernicious and repugnant to the faith of the Church. My answer to
them is brief and succinct: “Your letters, my brother Pammachius,
and those of your friends, have compelled me. You declared that these
books had been falsely translated by another, and that not a few things
had been inter486polated or added or altered. And, lest your letters should fail to
carry conviction, you sent a copy of this translation, together with
the Preface in which I was praised. As soon as I had run my eye over
these documents, I at once noticed that the impious doctrine enunciated
by Origen about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, to which the
ears of Romans could not bear to listen, had been changed by the
translator so as to give a more orthodox meaning. His other doctrines,
on the fall of the angels, the lapse of human souls, his prevarications
about the resurrection, his ideas about the world, or rather
Epicurus’s middle-spaces,30123012Intermundia. Spaces between the
worlds, in which, according to Epicurus, the Gods reside. on the
restitution of all to a state of equality, and others much worse than
these, which it would take too long to recount, I found that he had
either translated as they stood in the Greek, or had stated them in a
stronger and exaggerated manner in words taken from the books of
Didymus, who is the most open champion of Origen. The effect of all
this is that the reader, finding that the book expressed the catholic
doctrine on the Trinity, would take in these heretical views without
warning.